Hive Queen
thumb|A Hive Queen Hive Queens are the second highest class of hive bots, just below the Leviathan. Their goal is to fortify Settlements into Bastions, which can eventually become a Stronghold. Every system has at least one, it's just a matter of finding it. They are heavily guarded by Overseers, Guardian drones, Transport drones, and Assault drones. The Hive Queens themselves are armed with a Frigate Gun, which is similar to a Gatling Turret. However, the Frigate Gun is several times more powerful, is faster, and has better auto-aim. This gun was originally mounted on the Frigate and can kill a fighter in two or three shots. Killing a Hive Queen will not only give you thousands of experience points, but will also give you credit towards a Queen Hunter Badge, which entitles you to a special reward weapon (Mega Positron Blaster). Statistics How to Kill The tactics used to kill hive queens are as varied as the ship choices in Vendetta Online. I will first explain how to find a queen, and then outline a few methods to kill her. To find a queen, visit a sector with collector bots. Watch them mine, do not interfere. One will likely follow you, but they're easy to outrun. Eventually the miners will leave the asteroids to jump out of the sector. Be within 1000m when they jump to see where they went. In their destination sector is a hive queen. If the sector you warp into to watch the collector bots has a transport in it, kill it when you arrive, because otherwise the collectors will go to the transport rather than the queen. If the collector sector has guardian or assault bots, you can still follow them to find the queen, but you'll have to keep moving while you wait for the collectors to finish their work, otherwise you'll end up as some Tycorp's target practice. Killing a queen requires a bit of coordination and planning. There are two parts to a queen's armour -- a power shield, and the regular armour. The power shield regenerates, so you need to put on a lot of damage on her in a short amount of time to "crack" the shield. Once the shield is down, it will stay down as long as you keep damaging the queen, but if you get the shield down to 10%, it'll come back up in a few seconds. All the methods for "killing a queen" are really methods for killing the shield. The first method requires a group of at least three players. Equip yourselves with energy weapons, at least as good as Neutrons. Engage and destroy the entire escort. When the queen is alone, fire simultaneously to put maximum damage on her shield at the one time. If your timing is good, you'll have easy sailing. Voice chat amongst the group can help. The second method only requires access to the Ragnarok, chaos swarm missiles, and gemini missiles (these two missile types are chosen because they have the same speed). Load up your rag with this equipment. At about 1200 meters out, turn towards the queen and turbo up to 80m/s. Start launching your missiles, and follow where they go, staying close behind them. Continue to fire your missiles until you're either about to crash into the queen, or you're out of missiles. What you're trying to do is "stack" the missiles so that they're all flying in one small group. When they hit the queen all at once, they'll do a massive amount of damage, taking down the shield and probably knocking about 20% off her armour as well. Now you'll need to either reload, or come back with a different ship to finish it off; but do not take too long, if the queen is not damaged for five minutes the shield will return. The final method requires the Ragnarok, the Mega Positron Blaster, the Plasma Cannon HX, and a large power cell. Since the megaposi is only available to those who've already killed 10 queens, it is an "advanced" method, even though it's a lot less challenging than missile stacking. In this method, you kill off the escort first, then just blast the queen with all your weapons at once -- there's enough damage in a full burst to take down the shields of a "sector" hive queen. The trick is that you need to shoot her from the side or head on -- shooting her from behind spreads out the damage too much, so the shields will drop to about 10% but won't fall. It's got to be a side or head-on shot. Note: Hive Queens in Gray Space give 2300XP. The blast radius when a queen explodes is between 500 and 600 meters. Hive Queen Drops Category:Hive Bots